CREEDS – A dollar still goes pretty far at Monk’s Place – on the wall, over the bar, up the posts, even on the ceiling.

It’s tradition here to write a message on a dollar bill and tape it up for all to see. A patron who saw the practice elsewhere started it up here a few years back.

“The first one was – 8/8/11,” said John Kern, 69, the owner of Monk’s Place. He found the bill and read the date. It was on a column near the grill. “Rick Harrell. He’s the husband of the manager. You can call him the better half.”

That started something – messages, cartoons, announcements of love, notes memorializing past visits, boastfulness about that time somebody got a limo.

Fourth of July

Mickey 1957

BEST BURGER N TOWN

Monk’s In A Limo

If anyone was looking for Reese on March 7, a buck says Reese was here.

Kern said he heard the tradition was born elsewhere when a patron lacked money to cover his tab, so other regulars left bills behind for him. At Monk’s Place, the tradition sometimes includes taping up twenties, foreign currency, even used race tickets.

“It’s just something the customers do,” Kern said.

He has a dollar up, too: “Best of luck to everybody in here. Drive home safe.”

Some of messages keep a respectful distance from the Father of America’s face. Others scrawl clear across his mug. A very few messengers, as the comedians might put it, worked a bit “blue.”

The funniest one?

“It had to be taken down,” said Kris Witt, who works at Monk’s Place, during another visit.

You’ll have to use your imagination because, if second-hand descriptions of its content are accurate, the artist on that one certainly did.

“It’s still in here somewhere,” Witt said. “We turned it around.”

She has a dollar here that carries her own messages and symbols – four pink cherries, her name and her son’s name.

“Someone in here a few years ago started calling me Cherry, and it stuck.”

Pungo resident Herb Smith, 50, tapes a dollar bill bearing the names of his sons on the ceiling. He’s come to Monk’s since he was five, when his father brought him in. [John-Henry Doucette/The Princess Anne Independent News]

Again, Monk’s Place is not the only one to do this sort of thing. It seems to be all the rage in Florida.

In the Keys, one spot is rumored to have thousands of dollars on the walls and ceilings. At another place in the Keys, thousands are donated to charity after they fall of the wall, according to a report by Examiner.com.